Teaching Subtleties

Today was monkey girl's speech evaluation to see if she should stay in the program that works with her. Her two therapists were here and it was very brief. They already know her pretty well so they had answered most of the questions themselves and only had a few for us. The result was she's still about a month behind in her speech and so we had the option of keeping her in or discontinuing the program. I'd been thinking a lot about this for the last week and came to the conclusion that if she's allowed to continue then that would be in our best interest. I'm sure she's benefited from having them work one on one with her, in addition to the extra socialization she gets when they're here so why would I turn down anything that helps her. They were fine with my decision and even scheduled an extra two visits a month for the next three months (until her annual evaluation). I'm glad it's over, though we should have probably waited until the yearly evaluation anyways.

One of the things I asked the therapists about was whether it's okay if her words aren't always clear. They said it's fine for now since she's just started increasing her vocabulary. They're more worried about speech than articulation. That got me thinking about something that happened a couple of months ago and how monkey girl might be more worried about OUR articulation. It was late one night and the smoke detector started going off. I think it was the battery, but Dadda monkey thinks it's faulty. Anyways, the loud beeping was distressing to monkey girl so I showed her how to cover her ears with her hands and said 'ow'. She copied me and coped with it pretty well. For the next few days, every time she heard a loud noise, she'd cover her ears and say 'ow'.

Then one day we were reading a book and came across a part of the story where a new character was introduced, the owl. I pointed to the owl and told her what it was. She looked at me quizzically and I thought she was struggling with the word so I repeated it a couple of times to her. Monkey girl then looked up at me, covered her ears with her hands and said 'ow'. It was quite funny, but I wanted to clear up the confusion for her. I told her, no, it's like a tweet-tweet, but it's called an owl. She looked at me again and said 'ow' while covering her ears. I said, 'no, not ow, it's an ow-el', but she just wasn't getting it. Clearing up such a subtle difference has proven to be difficult and truth be told, we still haven't made the distinction. So in our family, owls apparently make loud annoying noises and when you come across one you need to point to it, cover your ears with your hands, and say 'ow'.